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CALGARY—An Olympic-size halfpipe is a gleaming open bowl of hard-packed snow 550 feet long with 22-foot-high walls.

Building it and maintaining it is a costly enterprise — so costly that fewer and fewer high-quality halfpipes are being built around the world.

That has those passionate about the sport — a new brand-new Olympic event for skiers at the upcoming Sochi Games — wondering where the next generation of athletes will come from.

“It’s easy for a resort to have a couple rails and a jump which gets kids started in slopestyle but it’s really hard to keep a good pipe,” said Canadian halfpipe skier Justin Dorey.

Lack of access is one reason why halfpipe is losing athletes to the newer discipline of slopestyle, where skiers and snowboarders do tricks down a series of jumps and metal rails. Slopestyle will also make its Olympic debut in Sochi.

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For Dorey, who booked his ticket to Sochi with a World Cup gold medal in Calgary this past Friday, access isn’t such a big problem anymore. He and his top Canadian freestyle ski teammates compete most of the year and so have decent access to the perfectly prepared halfpipes they need in order to develop new tricks.

“But all the kids that aren’t invited to X Games or Dew Tour or World Cups, what do they do? They’re left with nothing, so that’s a huge problem,” Dorey said.

“Pipe is really scary — the best people in the world admit it’s terrifying. If the pipe is not perfect, it’s really dangerous.”

The situation was made worse after the Vancouver Games when the standard was changed from 18-foot to 22-foot walls. Many resorts weren’t keen on investing in the new and costly equipment needed to make the larger pipe.

Canada Olympic Park, which hosted the World Cup competition last Friday, had to dynamite the bottom of its hill in 2011 to get the right slope for the larger pipe, said Daniel Lefebvre, director of the WinSport Academy at Canada Olympic Park.

The operating cost to build and maintain its halfpipe for a season is $180,000, said Mike Tanner, venue director for WinSport. But there’s another $630,000 in equipment plus other costs, bringing the investment to more than $1 million, he said.

Halfpipe snowboarding has been an Olympic event since the 1998 Nagano Games but next month in Sochi will be the first time for skiers. The event, along with slopestyle for skiers and snowboarders, was fast-tracked in to create an Olympic program that is younger and hipper than before.

Two of the biggest halfpipe ski stars are Canada’s Rosalind Groenewoud and Mike Riddle, both of whom are medal favourites going into the Games.

Megan Gunning, a Canadian skier still looking to qualify for Sochi, hopes that a second halfpipe event in the Olympics will help raise the sport’s profile and stem the losses to slopestyle.

“I think more hills will get the idea to build a good halfpipe and hopefully there will continue to be some awesome skiers out of Canada coming out for halfpipe,” said Gunning.

But even at Canada Olympic Park, which has both an Olympic-size pipe and a beginner pipe with 12-foot walls, it’s tough to get kids to choose pipe over the newer discipline of slopestyle.

“All the kids want to do slopestyle,” said Lefebvre, whose academy acts as a feeder program for provincial- and national-level teams.

They’ve got over 90 kids in freestyle disciplines and it’s a constant challenge to get some to consider specializing in halfpipe rather than slopestyle, he said.

“It used to be halfpipe that was cool with Shaun White but now it’s slopestyle and Mark McMorris,” he said, referring to the world’s top slopestyle star from Regina.

Halfpipe is becoming a more specialized sport but it’s far from dead, said Trennon Paynter, coach of the Canadian halfpipe ski team.

While Canada has only two halfpipes — in Calgary and Whistler, B.C. — that athletes say are well maintained all season, the situation is brighter south of the border.

“The amount of perfect halfpipes in the U.S. is growing. In the last year there are a couple resorts that didn’t previously have a perfect pipe that built one,” Paynter said.

“There’s got to be some reason they’re doing it, (but in) the rest of the world it’s just not happening.”

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